The PCIe 12VHPWR power plug was introduced last year through the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 series of graphics cards and although it was seen to allow powerful graphics cards such as the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 to use electrical power as high as 600W, there are many reports that show a number of these powerful graphics cards experienced an issue where the plug melted due to excessive heat production.
Igor's Lab has recently reported that they have received a document regarding the specifications of a new computer power plug named 12V-2×6. According to the document, this plug is developed in accordance with ATX 3.1 and PCIe 6.0 specifications which are not seen to have significant physical differences, but in terms of mechanics, the pins contained in this plug are loaded deeper to ensure a connection that will not cause any electrical leakage .
This new plug will also come with 150W and 300W detection modes, in addition to the 300W and 600W used on the previous 12VHPWR plug. PCI-SIG is also looking to introduce new standards for cable quality and headers to ensure that the issues plaguing users of 12VHPWR cables do not come hereafter.
For now, it is expected that this 12V-2×6 cable and plug will support the previous 12VHPWR plug without problems, and is expected to be officially introduced when a graphics card using the PCIe 6.0 standard is introduced later.